I Drink Your Milkshake..If You Don’t Keep An Eye On It!

As a chef for a good chunk of my life, I got a necessarily broad exposure to many of the world’s cuisines. And you might expect that I’d list among my favorite foods any number of exotic and even weird foods. But you’d be wrong. My list does contain a couple of things, like fiddlehead ferns, that aren’t the Flavor of the Week but my top five are almost ridiculously commonplace:

5. Jambalaya (If it’s made right, which means I have to make it. Which takes all the fun out of it.)

4. Chili (My own #1 Cherry-Smoked Venison chili, preferably)

3. A Big Juicy Hamburger (Now that Houston’s in Nashville has closed, I’m back to Red Mill.)

2. New England Clam Chowder (The benchmark is at McGarvey’s Pub in Annapolis.)

and my number one, all-time, hasn’t-changed-since-childhood food…

1. Ice Cream

Or gelato or custard or sherbet, in a pinch, or even a frozen mousse, as long as the gumminess factor doesn’t get in the way. Ice cream!: that silken, sensual, creamy, sweet, soothing-yet-stimulating ambrosia (curiously, can’t stand Ambrosia ice cream) that cools you down in summer and lifts your spirits up in winter. You can whip it into a frosty shake(!) with milk, roll it up in a cake, flop it on a brownie, smother it with chocolate sauce or caramel or fresh fruit, fluff it up and soft-serve it, layer it with cookies, cover it with nuts, shove a stick up it, or even douse it with rum and set it on fire, I don’t care. As long as it’s a) creamy and B) frozen, bring it on!

There was a time when I could honestly say that the worst ice cream I ever had was good. Then I turned seven and had to revise that. For the record, the worst ice cream I’ve ever had – aside from a couple of my own experiments [avocado-mint springs to mind] that wound up buried in the herb garden – is the Safeway brand stuff that is always on sale, I suppose, according to the old Southern principle: “Well, it ain’t that good but there is a lot of it.” I’ve conscientiously eaten/sampled every brand of ice cream I could find, ever since, as a freshman in college, I found out that there were more selections than the Kroger house brand. It’s a complete wooly-headed guess, I admit, but I’m sure it has to be over 500 different brands by now. And I am here to tell you that the very best ice cream I have ever eaten in my life…is right here in our own back yard.

On Bainbridge Island.

Made by Argentinians.

Argentinians! Good Grief, can’t we even be the best at something that, arguably, we invented? Well, unabashed homie that I am, I have to admit that, when it comes to taking ice cream “seriously”, we are simply not a patch on the tuchus of the Argentinians. Let’s face it, we Americans…we’re not picky – about much of anything that goes into our mouths. We guzzle oceans of Bud and Coors and Miller Lite, beers that are the less potent and less intense grandchildren of the original Czech Pilsners like Urquel, which were originally invented for ladies to drink. (Life-long Bud drinkers get positively squirmy when given an authentic Euro Ale, a style which the rest of the world consumes in titanic quantities.) We eat pasty, commercially-produced breads when making your own is one of the easiest and most fun things you can do in your kitchen. And we have almost killed Mexican food, with our fiery, cumin-laced, leaden dishes that completely ignore the fact that maybe 3/4 of the food made in Mexico is quite light, not that highly seasoned, and made with less than half the cheese we typically slather on.

So, the Argentinians and…ice cream? Sounds like kind of…well, not the first place you would look for frozen desserts. But you’d be wrong. Think of the very first thing that comes to mind when you think of Argentina: you’re probably either picturing a production of Evita or grilled beef. Well, skipping Evita for the nonce – although she loved ice cream – let’s deal with the beef. Made from…cows, right? Well, where there are cows, there’s…Milk! And, in Argenntina, the milk, by all accounts, is fresher and less fiddled-with than our myriad versions, which are so tightly controlled by the FDA that it amazes me there’s no black market for it. Every person I’ve talked with, who has been to Buenos Aires, comes back raving about the ice cream, yeah, but also about the simple glasses of milk. Delicioso, they rave, totally satisfying and tastes nothing like American milk. Well, in reality, it does. But to taste that sort of milk, nowadays, you have to go to a dairy farm, where the cows are fed grass, and drink it straight out of the separator. Aha! Enlightenment!

To the Argentinians, who have always welcomed Italian immigrants with open arms, the idea of gelato – the Italian, milk-not-cream, slow-churned variant of our ice creams – was like tuna to a housecat. They adopted gelato and proceeded to make it into a religion, with freshness, proper freezing, and NO artificial ingredients as their Holy Trinity. And they have now, arguably, outstripped the Italians as makers of artisan gelato.

This is the aesthetic that Jerry Perez and his wife, Anna Orselli, brought with them when they moved to Bainbridge Island from Buenos Aires. They opened Mora (Spanish for “blackberry”) Iced Creamery in Bainbridge’s Day Road Industrial Park and began making ice cream the way they learned it back home: Whole milk instead of heavy cream, all ingredients sourced locally and bought fresh, and the traditional slow-churned style that insures that the gelato is less shot through with air, more dense, more creamy/silken on the tongue. The difference is obvious just by looking at it: when a scoop is pulled up from the dish or cone, the gelato almost tears, pulling apart in long, dense, rag-like skeins. If it’s not mashed down, it will retain that shape until you eat it. On the tongue, it’s lighter, less viscous and gummy, but even more chewy and intense. The traditional Italian/Argentine choices, like Dulce de Leche and the moscato (Crema Rusa) or Marsala (Sabayon) flavors, are not at all dumbed down for American tastes and they all burst with flavors that are at once exotic and strangely comforting. My favorites are the Maron Glace, a delicate French chestnut flavor, and the Mascarpone, using real locally-produced fresh cheese. The other very different thing is the freezing. Mora, like most authentic Argentine gelatos, is held in closed-top, stainless-steel freezers, not displayed, purely for marketing purposes, in plastic cases like the big chains. It keeps the gelato colder, completely unmelted, and more dense than any other method.

I learned about Mora when Judye and I walked into Bellevue Square one day and found their shop. We ate some – because I have to – and were Majorly Hooked. That store has now closed and I found that out the same way: I walked into Bel Square and it was gone! In its place was another freakin’ Tully’s. On my own personal bummer scale, it was right up there with the day Edgar Martinez retired. Fortunately, they still have the production facility on Day Road and the retail shop pictured below, on Madrone Lane on Bainbridge, just off Winslow Way.

Their ice creams are so different that some people are simply unprepared for the flavors. On a Seattle food forum page, I found posts from three young people who had visited Mora and thought the ice creams “tasted artificial”. I posted back that, if they were comparing it to Baskin Robbins or Haagen Dasz, which do use artificial ingredients, it probably does taste funny. The only thing I can compare it to is what used to come out of my grandmother’s ice cream churn, back in Virginia, after we’d thrown in the fresh milk with strawberries we picked in the back yard; still the second-best ice cream I’ve ever tasted.

I yearn, with every fiber of my misshapen being, for a Mora location on this side of the water but the only way that can happen is if they make a LOT of money and get to re-expand. I just have this feeling, if you try it and think what I suspect you’ll think of it, that’ll happen sooner rather than later. Folks, nobody is making ice cream like this around these parts…nobody. Take a day-trip to Bainbridge…and hang a left to Buenos Aires!